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Wednesday, November 21, 2012

Date and Time Formatting the easy way (Video)

Yesterday I installed Lubuntu-Desktop on my Ubuntu installation to use as my desktop environment. My computer is old, and LXDE (the desktop environment that comes with Lubuntu) is the lightest and therefore fastest desktop out there.

So far I love to use, it. It doesn't present any real problems. I did have one annoyance, though. The LXDE clock applet (the clock, basically), was just set to have military timing. It didn't show the date either. The issue is with military timing is that I don't use it. Sure, I know how to convert it to AM/PM time, but I don't operate off of military time. I did a simple Bing Search and it turned up a these results. I clicked on one of the Ubuntu forum's listings, and to my surprise it solved my problems exactly.

The tool I found, titled For a Good Strftime, is a time tool online that lets you choose from a list of preset date and/or time formats, or you can build a custom one for yourself. It has a very simple, easy to use interface that basically involves dragging and dropping items, or clicking a bullet to get a preset format for you.

Once you choose one, or make a custom format, you can enter this into your clock applet by simply copy and pasting the code to the right. I have a some some nice video below. I did have a text editor that did hold my outcome, but trust me you can generate the same thing yourself. Characters such as the colon can be added manually into the box.I have 3 screenshots for you to look at, and a video tutorial. The video is not as best as I would have planned, but the tool that I'm using hiccuped for a second or two. No worries, as the end goal was achieved.

A video tutorial is below. This tutorial was taken in the LXDE Desktop Environment, installed on Ubuntu via the lubuntu-desktop package.